That Terrible Twelve?

BEING a film critic, especially a daily film critic is like playing tennis with a dozen people on the other side of the net: you can hardly keep track of all the serves, much less return even two or three of them with any grace. You become so involved with the panic, the terror, the joy and the sheer physical effort of the moment that you tend to forget what the game is all about. Which is why non‐film‐oriented criticism—that is, criticism written by critics sitting in the bleachers — can occasionally be so insightful. I think especially of work by people like Susan Sontag and the late Robert Warshow, who were fascinated by films, but who were not so committed to them that most of their lives—social as well as dream—became extensions of their professional activities.

There is, however, an awful lot of junk written in the bleachers by people you might think would know better. A case in point is “What The Movies Try To Sell Us (With cardboard emotion, Hollywood builds a flimflam vision of the world)” by Lewis Lapham, a former contributing editor of Harper's who survived the Willie Morris revolt to become the magazine's managing editor. The article, in the November issue, is announced by the sort of cover (the Columbia Pictures logo, Miss Liberty, turned into a vacuous starlet wearing hot pants) that Esquire does better, but because it is pointless, it is highly appropriate to the contents of the piece, which is so pious (and sometimes ill‐informed) that it might appeal to the higher sentiments of the late Cohn.

Mr. Lapham describes himself as an average moviegoer without critical intentions who, during the past summer, for reasons lie does not go into, found himself seeing “an unusual number of movies” (actually, 12) “in a brief period of time.” On the basis of these 12 films, Mr. Lanham has written a critique that, I assume, is supposed to be an overview of the cultural phenomenon represented by contemporary movies, but from the way it reads, it seems to be less of an overview than an underview — notes jotted down with a ballpoint pen by someone trying to describe the passengers in a glass‐bottom boat, while he gazes upward through the transparend deck. Everybody looks alike and they are all the same height.

The films that Mr. Lanham saw were “Carnal Knowledge,” “Shaft,” “Doc,” “Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?”, “Klute,” “The Panic in Needle Park,” “The Last Picture Show,” “The Hired Hand,” “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “Marriage of a Young Stockbroker,” “The Love Machine” and “The Anderson Tapes.” Although these are the only titles he mentions, he refers obliquely to other recent films, such as “The Hellstrom Chronicle” and “Shinbone Alley,” when he generalizes about the flimflam vision being presented to us: “A cockroach can be a hero, and woman is nearly always a whore.”

Mr. Lapham writes with the assurance of someone who has neither a critic's interest in the art of the movies nor a decent, plodding sociologist's interest in the way the movies reflect contemporary society, except to the extent that these visions of American life are romantic corruptions designed to sell tickets to people with juvenile minds. By treating as equals all 12 movies — the good, the bad and the mostly mediocre — Mr. Lapham is able to come up with the kind of trend piece that is the backbone of a certain kind of journalism, which is out to make a buck as furiously as any movie.

Even though (and I have changed the author's past tenses to present ones) “the wrong people get elected to political office, big business exploits the poor, black people don't like white people, and every now and then it rains on Sunday,” Mr. Lapham finds this insufficient reason for movies to reflect and exploit these things. “Other people at other times have suffered worse afflictions,” he says, which has about as much to do with an intelligent discussion of current conditions and current films as does the argument that a child should eat its spinach because people are starving in Pakistan. Each of these movies depressed Mr. Lapham because they all followed the same text: “that man is a weak and pitiable creature, that he stands no chance against ‘the system’ (never defined but always malevolent), and that his pathetic dreams of love or bank robbery must end in failure and death.”

To which I might add that Mr. Lapham should go see “A New Leaf,” “Valdez Is Coming,” “Blue Water, White Death,” “On Any Sunday,” “Sunday, Bloody Sunday,” “The Trojan Women,” “Desperate Characters,” “Kotch,” “The Railway Children,” “Bunny O'Hare” and “Fiddler on The Roof.” Like Mr. Lapham, I'm not making any distinctions between good movies and bad, just citing those films that seem to possess to a greater, rather than a lesser, degree the positive aspects of the human condition —as do several of the movies that Mr. Lapham saw, though he apparently didn't get the point. In “Klute,” for which I have no great admiration except for Jane Fonda's formance, an emotionally frigid call girl is rehabilitated through the love of a good man (at least, she cleans up her apartment and, at the end, it seems quite likely she will eventually settle down with him in the wilds of Pennsylvania).

In a reference to the rich girl in “The Last Picture Show,” Mr. Lapham says it's no accident that so many of the heroines of the films are whores, or women who act like whores. Yet the role of the coach's wife—a character of immense love and feeling—is just as important to “The Last Picture Show” as the town's young, beautiful bitch. He describes the Candice Bergen character in “Carnal Kndwledge” as “a blond, selfish, merciless bitch who finds perverse pleasure in playing two friends off against each other”—whereas in the movie I saw she was a sensitive, intelligent girl caught in a situation that wasn't of her own making, and that made her miserable. Further, Mr. Lapham seems to feel that because the two young men in “Carnal Knowledge” see marriage “as the end to freedom and illusion,” this is what the movie sees. The film, however, is a terrible object lesson in the futility of the sort of carnal knowledge pursued by the two young men.

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I could go on at great length about the specific examples cited by Mr. Lapham, but I'm more interested in his generalizations, such as the fact that most of the people in these movies, especially in the ones with urban settings, “seem to wander around in a void, without connections to fam ily, friends, church, neighborhood, political organization, or any kind of government.” He finds also that “moral law” is irrelevant, that “society always appears as an instrument of destruction,” that love is futile, and, most persuasively, that “each movie makes a point of describing a godforsaken waste.”

“The predominant image of the world is that of an implacable wilderness,” he says, and whether or not it's true of each of the films he cites (it isn't), Mr. Lapham totally ignores the comparable tradition in American literature, in Melville, Twain, Crane, Dreiser, Anderson, Sinclair, Algren, Kerouac, Burroughs and dozens of others, none of whose works have as yet so softened the minds of the citizenry that some kind of literature czar had to be brought in to straighten out authors and the nation.

Mr. Lapham doesn't actually suggest that this should be done for films, but he warns that unless moviemakers start making movies that (as I understand it) show us positive heroes, with nice friends, having associations with churches and civic groups, who are partners in fulfilling marriages, within a society that pays attention to them, well, then, “somebody else will, somebody in a uniform.” Which is a most peculiar sort of warning from the author who, early in his article, states flatly that the movies he saw “begin with an ideological premise rather than with an idea for a story....”

I think I probably have an even more jaundiced view of most moviemakers than Mr. Lapham has, yet I'm not shocked by the idea that they are out to make money, any more than I'm shocked that Harper's is out to make money, or that I myself am. Most movies are as terrible as Mr. Lapham says, but to talk about 12 movies, as he does, without making any artistic value judgments seems to me to be as shortsighted, and witless, as the movie mogul who talks about his own productions only in terms of whether or not they were financially successful. To the movie mogul, in hindsight, the good movie is the one that made money and the bad movie is the one that flopped.

Much of what Mr. Lapham says is true, but it's only pertinent if he can prove that directors like Mike Nichols, Robert Altman, Ulu Grosbard, Peter Bogdanovich, Gordon Parks, Frank Perry and Sidney Lumet all consciously set out to exploit what Mr. Lapham calls “the collective vision of despair.” Even then I'm not sure whether it would be pertinent, because some of their movies are good and some lousy — and good mo,‐ies, which cannot be judged by intentions, enrich the world, increase one's perceptions and (for lack of a better phrase) are morally relevant, no matter how they fit into trendy pieces on the order of “What The Movies Try To Sell Us.”